In a 2011 CBC Radio interview, Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson was asked why the sun was such a central theme in his famous pocket symphonies. His answer: “Because it’s California sunshine, you know?” (He then proceeded to sing an impromptu, acapella version of “Do It Again.”) It was a delightfully straightforward, almost childlike answer given by a man who wrote heavenly songs to bat away the demons that terrorized and ravaged him in his waking life.

Love & Mercy, an unconventional biopic based on Wilson, isn’t so much about sunshine as it is about his demons. The focus is the anguish and isolation that plagued him from his early days as a musical prodigy and deep into his adult years, when drugs and anxiety nearly reduced his mind to mush. It may be the best musician portrait of the millennium so far, for its artistic ambition, supreme sound design and chilling performances.

It’s a hard enough thing telling someone’s life story in two measly hours, but when your subject is Wilson, a man whose life is so legendary it could easily fill a 1,000-page book, the Wikipedia biopic approach simply won’t cut it. Bad biopics try to shove a life story into a bottle; good ones take on a life of their own. Director Bill Pohlad and screenwriter Oren Moverman get it: instead of going with the “rock ‘n’ roll rise ‘n’ fall” approach, they use two critical, defining slices of Wilson’s life to render a beautifully complex, abstract interpretation of the man who gifted us “Good Vibrations” and “California Girls.” Despite covering only two portions of Wilson’s life, Pohlad and Moverman’s film feels rounded, complete, and faithful to its subject’s soul and spirit.

The narrative is stereophonic, in a way. It tells two stories, phasing them into a larger arc with clever scene arrangement and seamless editing that echoes the fluidity of Boyhood‘s invisible time jumps. Paul Dano plays a young Brian in the ’60s, whose artistic awakening has coincided with the emergence of a debilitating anxiety disorder; John Cusack plays him in the ’80s, a chemically imbalanced mess who’s unsure of every word that escapes his lips.

’80s Brian is a man on a leash, held captive by Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), a shady therapist who’s taken charge of Brian’s life and, conveniently, his funds. (Landy’s moved into Brian’s Malibu mansion, moving Brian to a smaller house up the coast.) Brian meets his savior and future wife in Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), a savvy car saleswoman who he asks on a date while sitting in a car she’s in the process of selling him. Melinda and Brian’s romance and camaraderie and her efforts to liberate him from the imperious Dr. Landy drive their half of the film.

The earlier time frame covers the Beach Boys in their prime, topping the charts and competing for pop culture dominance with The Beatles. An early scene has the camera slowly circling Dano’s Brian, sitting at a piano and playing a kernel of a song that, as the movie progresses, turns into “God Only Knows,” which would become widely regarded as one of the best songs ever written. His gift comes with a curse: severe panic attacks begin to wreak havoc on his psyche, torturing him as he creates Pet Sounds, an album that would become his preeminent masterpiece.

Wilson led a turbulent life from the start, going from being the son of an emotionally and physically abusive father and straight into the arms of Dr. Landy. He didn’t live life on his terms, instead resigning himself to the role of peon for most of his adult life. The only time he had absolute control was in the studio, where he was notoriously meticulous about the execution of his musical arrangements. Pohlad recreates the famous Pet Sounds sessions in brilliant detail, in the same studio where Wilson and The Wrecking Crew laid down the classic record. Dano gets Wilson’s obsessive perfectionism down, well, perfectly, vocalizing to the musicians exactly how he wants each note played. He yells to the cello player from the booth: “Taka-ta-taka-ta-taka-ta-taka!”

Love & Mercy glides forward gracefully, flitting from side to side between the two time periods like a well handled hockey puck. Its shape doesn’t resemble any biopic I’ve ever seen, and that’s its strongest quality. It jumps forwards and backwards in time, but the story’s movement feels lateral, not linear. The way Pohlad accomplishes this is by letting the two stories breathe and develop on their own terms and on their own time, apart from each other. They’re weaved together with sharp filmmaking technique, but beyond that they’re completely discrete.

The most glaring proof of this is the fact that Dano and Cusack look nothing alike. Their interpretations of Wilson are unique, and there doesn’t seem to be any sense of continuity between their performances. This is a good thing. If they’d used makeup to make them look more alike, it would have soured the pot from the get-go.

Looper comes to mind: What sold Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a younger Bruce Willis wasn’t the creepy-looking makeup; it was his performance. It was the twitches, the way he spoke, the way he walked, the way he held his hands, the way he raised his eyebrow. Cusack looks nothing like Dano or Wilson, but when he’s in motion—dangling his arms at his sides, whispering like a child with a secret—he sounds and moves and feels just like Wilson. He had a steeper hill to climb than Dano (who’s a dead-ringer for a young Wilson in every way), but he makes it to the other side without the aid of prosthetics or CG tomfoolery. Impressive.

This is the most subtle, measured performance of Dano’s career. He’s always been a standout, but always seems to be aggressively trying to steal scenes in an almost competitive, selfish manner that occasionally undermines his on-screen partners (he does this in Looper to Gordon-Levitt, actually). The fact that he’s playing such an iconic man (who happens to still be alive) in this movie seems to have calmed him down a bit and allowed him to explore nuance in a way he never has before. As a bonus, he plays the piano and sings himself, an extra detail musicians will no doubt appreciate. (Nothing’s worse than the disconnect of hearing a lovely piano tune as an actor flails his fingers across the keys like a faulty marionette.

(Cue “Heroes and Villains.”) Banks and Giamatti’s contributions to the film shouldn’t be understated. They’re both phenomenal, and in fact share a handful of scenes together, one of which may be the film’s best. In the throes of a nasty legal battle (Landy was Wilson’s legal guardian for a time), Dr. Landy pays Melinda a visit at the car dealership, pounding on her locked office door like a threatened gorilla, screaming obscene threats. Eventually, Melinda swings the door open. The look on Banks’ face as she stares down Giamatti is more badass than anything you’ll see in any action blockbuster this summer. She’s killer.

Wilson devotees will likely be moved to tears by Love & Mercy (“God Only Knows” is waterworks material for me no matter the context), thought the experience of the uninitiated will be no less special. This man is a certified American icon, and for his legacy to be preserved in a way that comes ever so close to matching his artistry is a wonderful thing. The film’s only major obstacle is Cusack’s resemblance issue. If you can’t get past it, you may find yourself repeatedly thrown out of the movie every time he saunters into frame. If you can get past it (it took me a while, but I did), you’ll have a film experience to treasure for years to come.

I’d been fearing for years that, once a film about Brian Wilson was made, it would be one of those painfully formulaic biopics that have become so stale as of late. The Beach Boys frontman deserves a more artful big screen tribute than that; aside from being a veritable musical genius, he’s lived one of the most turbulent, awe-inspiring lives in documented rock and pop history.

Bill Pohlad‘s Love & Mercy, I’m relieved to report, is no soup-to-nuts hagiography, but rather an abstract, moody interpretation of two very important slices of Wilson’s life. Paul Dano plays a young Wilson in the process of writing the songs that would become Pet Sounds. An older, more mentally damaged Brian is played by John Cusack. Paul Giamatti joins Cusack’s half of the film as Dr. Eugene Landy, who in the ’80s exploited Wilson’s wealth and health, overmedicating him while he shacked up in one of Wilson’s mansions. Elizabeth Banks plays Melinda Ledbetter, Wilson’s soul mate who attempts to wrest Brian from Dr. Landy’s poisonous grip.

The film’s fragmented approach allows it to reach a stunning level of intimacy with Brian and his mind. During his visit to San Francisco this past April for the San Francisco International Film Festival, I spoke with Pohlad about the film and his experiences with Wilson, as well as the shining contributions of the rest of his team. Love & Mercy opens wide tomorrow, Friday, June 5th.

What did you like about Oren Moverman’s script that drew you to the project?
To be honest, it happened the other way around. There was a script floating around about Brian called Heroes & Villains that came to us. I read it and didn’t really like it, but I liked the idea of doing a movie about Brian Wilson. I met with Brian and Melinda and got a sense for trying to tell this story in a different way. I was never really interested in doing a biopic. In meeting them, I learned that she actually did meet him without knowing who he was and was kind of attracted to him, even though he was a bit quirky and odd. Then, she learned who he was and that all this weird stuff was going on around him. I thought it was a great way to get into his story. I was intrigued by that chapter of his life and the Pet Sounds period when he was so super-creative. It felt like those two strands would be the way to go to tell a story. We interviewed a bunch of writers, but Oren was a standout. It was one of those things where you immediately connect with somebody. We got along very well. It kind of took off from there.

I remember in high school buying the big Pet Sounds Sessions box set. The green one. I loved it. I listened to it front to back over and over. It had all these different versions of songs and Brian getting annoyed with everyone. [laughs] It was emotional for me to see those studio session recreated.
I did the same thing, buying that box set and being entranced by it and listening to it all the time. It was exciting to think about trying to recreate that. It was a magical time during the shoot, and the whole shoot honestly had a magic to it that doesn’t always happen in film production. We shot that studio section first, and it was great to be able to be in that studio, which is the actual one he recorded most of Pet Sounds in. I wanted it to have this spontaneous feel that I had appreciated in years growing up with Let It Be or Sympathy For the Devil, films like that where you’re able to get an inside look at what it’s like in the studio when guys are creating music like that. We actually hired real musicians, not actors, and gave them sheet music like they would get in a session. Paul would go in after listening to the Pet Sounds sessions over and over to get a sense of how Brian works, and we’d just let him go. We had two 16mm cameras and shot it like a documentary.

At my wedding my wife walked down the aisle to “God Only Knows.” That scene where Paul’s writing that song at the piano killed me; I got very emotional.
Shooting that was emotional, but the whole project was emotional, to be honest. The second thing we shot was the scene when he’s writing “Surf’s Up” at the piano. Paul sat and played “Surf’s Up” for, like, three hours in front of the crew. He was amazing. That was really emotional because I knew what Paul and all of us had invested in this. We were kind of doing this shot-by-shot recreation from a documentary. The “God Only Knows” thing was equally emotional because, yes, I love that song. It’s such a great song. I wanted to capture this progression of moments. When you first see him it’s like he’s just coming up with this song, and then it develops. He gets more sure of it, and by the end he’s playing it for his father. Showing that progression was really special.

Is it tricky selling John Cusack as Brian Wilson since, frankly, he looks nothing like him?
First of all, he does kind of look like him.

You think so? I don’t see it.
He just looks like him from another period. If you look at shots of Brian from the ’80s, he’s this big, bearded behemoth, almost. Then, he’d look like this skinny, emaciated guy. He was working with Landy, and his weight was going up and down. We were really trying to figure out which look we’d go with and who would portray him. I watched the Don Was documentary I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, which was shot in the early ’90s. There’s a shot early on of him in a leather jacket, and he looks like John. People say they don’t look alike occasionally, but Melinda and Brian say to them, “Yes he does!”

But I didn’t want them to be doing things like using prosthetics to make John look more like Brian or Paul. I also didn’t encourage John and Paul to work together. I wanted them to find their own, organic way into the character. You kind of let them find it. John did it by spending time with Brian and the Smile sessions. Paul did it by spending time with the Pet Sounds sessions and trying to get a sense for Brian back in that time. He said working with Brian wouldn’t have been as productive as John working with Brian.

John got Brian’s walk almost exactly, with his arms turned forward.
I’ve had psychologists and doctors say that the way John walks and the way he holds his hands are all indications of when somebody is over-medicated or getting the wrong medication.

Paul resembles Brian so much.
It’s spooky at times.

What was it like meeting Brian for the first time?
It was amazing. The first thing I’ll admit is that I grew up as a Beatles guy, and I think that’s good, in a way. There were a lot of people who wanted to be involved in the picture because they loved Brian, but it’s almost like they were too close, too big of fans. I’ve gotten more into Brian and his music over the years, and very into it about 15-20 years ago through Pet Sounds. But I think it’s good to have some objectivity. When I met Brian, it was a thrill, but I didn’t fall over. The key thing is to represent the human side of him. The celebrity and musical genius side is important, and we want to get that across, but what I want more than anything is to be able to relate to this guy. If you want to put him up on a pedestal and survey his life, you do that in a biopic. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to relate to this guy. I think the mental health issues he went through carry a more important message than saying how great a guy he is. It’s about how we treat people and how we make assumptions about people who have those challenges.

Giamatti is killer.
It’s tough, because a character like Landy…[pauses]. I couldn’t find anybody who had anything positive to say about him. He’s dead, so we don’t have a lot to go on, but you don’t want to create a one-dimensional character. You want to relate to what drove him to this and brought him to this place. There are a lot of subtleties, and having Paul Giamatti navigate those waters is huge.

One of my favorite moments in the movie is when Elizabeth Banks opens that office door in Paul’s face. She looked like such a warrior.
All of that happened [in real life]. She was in the office with the door locked and he was yelling outside. Honestly, with Brian’s story, there are so many things that happened that you would just never put in a script because they’re unbelievable. [laughs] At the end when Brian walks out in front of Melinda’s car, we struggled with that for a long time. We thought, nobody’s going to believe that! It sounds like a movie thing! It literally happened that way. Brian walked out in front of the car and she almost ran into him. As a filmmaker, it’s hard to pull it off without people thinking it’s a movie convention or something.

Favorite Beach Boys song?
“God Only Knows.” But it’s tough. “Don’t Worry Baby” would be up there.

“Good Vibrations” is my number two.
“Surf’s Up” is really great. I could go on and on.

Talk about your approach to sound. I assume that’s high priority in a film like this.
Oh, totally. Brian has aural hallucinations, not visual. Your default thing in a movie is to put all these weird things on-screen and create a “trip.” But this is what he’s hearing in his head, all these disparate chords and harmonies. They’re a part of his genius, but he can’t turn it off, so it becomes part of his nightmare as well. I wanted to figure out a way to depict that so people understood it. I thought “Revolution Number 9” off the Beatles’ White Album would be a good model. We sat down with Atticus Ross and he got it immediately. Beyond the “mind trips,” the score itself is Brian’s music, just rearranged. We’ve taken the stems from the original recordings, taken one from one song and one from another, and weaved them together. I hope Atticus’ story of what he did on this movie comes out, because it’s extraordinary.

I loved how audacious those hallucinations are. You’ll hear a weird sound mixed very hard to the right, and then a loud chord all the way on the left. Crazy stuff.
Our sound mixer Chris Jenkins’ contributions are as valuable as Atticus’ or mine.

What was the hardest thing for Brian to watch?
Brian’s quite hard to read. He’s very asocial. It’s not his thing. But I wanted to make sure he was onboard and made sure the film [was credible], so we had a table read for him early on, just the script. At times I thought he wasn’t paying attention at all or that he was sleeping. An hour later, he’d come back with these really insightful notes. The guy was listening the whole time! When he saw a rough cut the first time, he watched it alone. I heard he liked it, but I didn’t get to watch it with him until Toronto. He never shared what the hardest thing about it was, but he says reliving that whole process is hard for him.

He’s a curious guy. if you ask him about Landy now, he’d say, “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Landy,” even though he knows everything Landy did to him. He still sees it in a childlike way, a purity that’s just fascinating. But then, for the rough cut, he said we were being too kind to Landy. He thought our portrayal was a little softer than he actually was.

Inspired by the passionate reaction CJ received for his Mad Max: Fury Road review, Bernard and CJ discuss the value and (un)importance of critical consensus on this week’s Way Too Indiecast. Bernard also review’s Bill Pohlad’s new drama Love & Mercy, starring both Paul Dano and John Cusack as Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson at two separate junctures in his life. The boys also share their favorite music movies and offer up their Indie Picks of the Week on this jam-packed show.

Topics

• Indie Picks of the Week (1:50)
• Critical Consensus (10:22)
• Favorite Music Movies (36:33)
• Love & Mercy Review (52:16)

WTI Articles Referenced in the Podcast

Tu Dors Nicole review
This Ain’t No Mouse Music review
Chris Strachwitz interivew
Mad Max: Fury Road review

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Love & Mercy

Brian Wilson wrote some of the most beautifully complex pieces of music in history throughout his decades-long career with the Beach Boys and beyond. But as a person, he’s more beautifully complex than anything anyone could ever write. Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy explores Wilson’s psyche from two angles, focusing on the biggest artistic and personal turning points in his life. Paul Dano plays a Wilson as a young man in the Beach Boys’ heyday, in the midst of writing what would become one of the greatest albums of all time, Pet Sounds. Making up the other half of the movie is a more recent, frightening period in Wilson’s life (he’s played here by John Cusack), when he was under the (highly medicated) spell of unethical therapist Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), his only protection from whom being his beach blonde soul mate, Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks).

Alternating between the two Brians is a welcome break from the typical biopic schematic. Dano’s resemblance is scary uncanny, and while Cusack’s isn’t so spot-on (I didn’t see it, to be honest), their commitment as actors is about level. Beach Boys fans will suffer uncontrollable geek-outs during the Pet Sounds studio session reenactments, but the real value of the film lies in the respectfully unkempt and fraught depiction of Wilson’s legacy as both a musician and a man.

Experimenter

Slipping between several planes of reality with the nimbleness of a jazz ensemble, Michael Almereyda‘s Experimenter, starring Peter Sarsgaard as late social psychologist Stanley Milgram, is more of a delectable treat than the dark subject matter might lead you to believe. It centers on Milgram’s famed contributions to the world of social experimentation, most notably his controversial experiment on obedience conducted in the ’60s. We see the Holocaust-inspired experiment—involving test subjects led to believe they’re remotely causing harm to a man in an adjacent room (played by Jim Gaffigan)—reenacted by a litany of strong players, including Anton Yelchin, John Leguizamo, Anthony Edwards, and others.

The film sees Sarsgaard’s Milgram periodically address us, the audience, in cleverly worded monologues that highlight the actor’s natural wit and intellect. It’s fun to see Sarsgaard given so much breathing room; he has a lot of fun with the role, and so we do as well. Almereyda lets loose too, with neat touches like utilizing rear-projection backdrops and employing a real-life elephant to stalk behind Sarsgaard down a hall as a fun metaphor. Winona Ryder stars as Milgram’s wife, Sasha, and gives the film an emotional oomph whose importance is clearest by film’s end.

7 Chinese Brothers

Jason Schwartzman is ridiculously funny in Bob Byington‘s 7 Chinese Brothers, a film created in the Wild West indie landscape that panders to no one (mainstream audiences will likely balk at the quaint, offbeat humor), but will please crackpot-comedy weirdos (like yours truly) to no end. Larry (Schwartzman) is a small-town schlub who drinks his way into and out of menial jobs he can’t stand. He’s got his romantically savvy friend, Major Norwood (TVOTR’s Tunde Adebimpe), his silvery grandmother (Olympia Dukakis), and his impossibly drowsy dog (Schwartzman’s real dog, Arrow) to keep him company most days. When he finds himself gravitated to his new boss, Lupe (Eleanore Pienta), he’s shocked to discover that, for once, he actually looks forward to going to work.

A lot of the funniest stuff in 7 Chinese Brothers involves Schwartzman almost having a contest with himself, trying to come up with the most bizarre behaviors he can think of and making them as out-there as possible. It’s the little, absurdist stuff that makes you laugh, like Schwartzman throwing garbage into a garbage can, and then throwing said garbage can into a dumpster. Byington’s written a great script, too, each line of dialogue going in a different direction than you expected. Keep this one in mind.

Battling lymphoma and facing his own mortality, Clark Wang prepares to make his last act a gift to the planet and undergoing a “green funeral”. Chances are you’re thinking, “What even is a green funeral?” Filmmakers Amy Browne, Jeremy Kaplan, Tony Hale and Brian Wilson tackle the subject while tracking Clark through the process in their upcoming documentary A Will for the Woods.

Green burials are an alternative to contemporary funeral practices that involves fewer resources, and a more natural disposal process. Bodies are laid to rest in the earth using only biodegradable material, often in woodlands or other natural settings, attempting to help restore those areas. After hearing about a North Carolinian man preparing to take part in this old tradition, the filmmakers began to document Clark Wang’s journey to inspire his community and get them to take part in his green burial.

From the director’s statement, “For all of us, one of the core motivations in making A Will for the Woods was to shed light on this profound environmental and social movement. At first, we were primarily fascinated with green burial as a strategy for land conservation and the reduction of environmental impacts, but… we saw what a powerful spiritual experience green burial can be.”

Watch the trailer for A Will for the Woods below and check the film’s website for screenings near you: